With concerns about gang, gun and knife crime currently to the fore, it is little wonder to find a new production of Romeo and Juliet highlighting this theme in battles between the Montagues and Capulets. Given that the director is Michael Bogdanov, with his track record of audacious stagings of Shakespeare, it is even less of a surprise. Bogdanov reprises the radically updated final scene he gave his 1974 production, played as a brash press conference, in this new version.
Yet, like much else here, it falls flat. In 1974, Bogdanov had Jonathan Kent as Romeo; here he has Jack Ryder, best known as Jamie Mitchell in EastEnders. Ryder struggles to carry the role, delivering the lines without rhythm or vigour, and hoping to inhabit the part by standing still and raising his arms sideways a lot. There is not even the merest tingle of passion conveyed between him and Sara Lloyd-Gregory's Juliet, though she is more affecting in her soliloquies.
The production feels amateurish and self-indulgent, especially in the hackneyed use of music, with the Prodigy's Firestarter for a fight scene and, this being Wales, the requisite dollop of Manic Street Preachers. It is not the modernising gestures that irk here, though, but the lack of coherence, together with moments that come perilously close to farce. Why does the nurse ride about on a bike with baguettes in the basket? Why does Juliet wave a gun at Friar Laurence? Why the press conference ending? These details might melt away if we could believe in our star-cross'd lovers and their world. Sadly, we never really do.
